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Memory is a fickle thing. No one can validate it nor fully disprove it.
What makes memory so unique is its subjectability. How it twists and cracks and warps with time, how it fades color, intensifies sound or cancels it out altogether. How the scent of mundane things can recall the most vivid recollections. Or how, given the right circumstances, memory no longer feels real, but akin to a film in an empty auditorium.
Sana’s own memories had begun blurring by the hundredth count. By the thousandth, she had lost understanding of whatever physicality she had left. She lost track of her hands, her legs, her mouth and eyes.
She had since ceased the habit of counting each period of wakefulness, only measuring matters such as if she still recalled her own name or what the sky looked like — despite the matter that there was no sky where she now resided.
To test this, Sana tried to imagine a cloud flitting over the colorless nothing above and all around her, but her imagination must have packed its bags and left around the five-hundredth mark. So she stared ahead with passive disinterest. There was nothing she expected to arise and nothing she expected to fall away. The vast dominion she perceived only changed with her awareness; it slowly receded in and out, in and out. Her own existence as the breath of some larger being’s lungs.
Sana might have likened it to the waves of an ocean — for she understood the notion of tides — but she’d never seen the ocean before.
Most of her ‘waking’ time she spent dull and distant, trying to submerge memories and bubbling emotions deeper into the void around herself. She held onto the autonomy of her ‘self’ only to the extent that it justified being distinct, separate from what she could perceive. The nothingness. But even for all her efforts to suffocate the swelling memory, moving its way leisurely, threateningly, to the surface, Sana still suffered with the affliction of her past.
Sana felt the world quake. Memory, awareness, erupting out of nothing, now a snowglobe of sensation. Part of herself wanted to recoil back into the void, where sentiments no longer haunted her; another, louder part held fast to the memory, relishing senses that had been suppressed for so long. This juxtaposition made Sana, as a whole, nauseated.
It was spring. The wind was mild, the sky was clear and bright and optimistic. Blooming trees and flowers unfurled, risking vulnerability, to gain nourishment from the sun.
She was standing at a bus stop, eyes downcast to her battered leather shoes and once-white stockings under a pleated skirt. The shoes scuffed the ground, perhaps out of boredom or nervousness, before kicking a loose pebble across the sidewalk. Both hands gripped a totebag, turning red at the knuckles, the right hand displaying a row of well-chewed nails. It felt like she had been standing for a while, longer than one might normally stand at a bus stop, but Sana couldn’t quite recall why.
Seconds dragged by like days, like weeks, like the countless periods of consciousness assailing her without remorse.
Eventually, the bus came, clamoring along the cracked pavement. It didn’t slow, didn’t stop to allow passengers on. The tarnished metal walls simply whooshed by, throwing up a puddle of water with its screeching wheels. Sana only noticed she was covered in mud when she raised a trembling arm up to check her watch; the face was cracked but the thin arms still ticked off seconds with uncanny precision.
Her body choked up with a heavy heart, smearing the soil on her cheeks with fresh tears. But the pain reverberated only faintly to Sana’s distant mind. She couldn’t muster a drop of empathy, numb to the sorrow of another time. It was past, it was over. It wasn’t her anymore.
Sana watched the same unkempt patent-leather shoes shrug away down the street from the bus stop. The sun began to sink in the characteristic orange glare of sunset, a handful of stars beamed through the rays, and before long it was nightfall. Sana’s vision slumped and her heavy body sagged into a nearby alleyway, moving clumsily to the back door of an apartment building. The lights were off, but she didn't bother to reignite them as she slipped those beaten shoes off at the door. The room she slept in was furthest away, tucked beside the storage closet. The bowl of food left at the base of the shabby door was cold to the touch and smelled vaguely like cat food.
Pushing the chipped dish aside, the door creaked open with a small Errrrrr.
Her feet scrambled through the barren room, closing the bedroom door with a mildly less disruptive squeak. Sana fell face-first into the crumpled sheets, immune to the caked-on dirt flaking off her skin onto the bedspread. Sana noticed the far-off aching of her feet and the stringy weight of muddied hair around her face, but neither motivated her enough to resolve these miseries. The world kept turning, her watch kept ticking on. The memory dissolved back towards senseless sleep…
Sana was left alone once again. Devoid of feeling. Weightless, watching, wanting for nothing.
- -
Sana hadn’t always been invisible.
There was a time when others exchanged words with her. When they shared lunch, or stole her bookbag, or walked home in the same group. But she had always been absentminded, an airhead, devoid of substance. Unlike her successful, highly-driven brothers, she had no passion in life. She barely managed to pass classes, spending long hours in the school library to little avail. Above all else, she felt contempt for herself. She felt her own worthlessness and it weighed each breath like a lead balloon. Her lungs compressed, her ribs began to stiffen; each breath became a heavy sigh. Her step-father grew stern and disdainful. Her mother severed ties between their “perfect family” and Sana’s floundering disappointment of an existence.
Slowly, people at school began to whisper.
About how she was a waste of space.
About how little her family cared about her.
About how illiterate, untalented, unattractive, unmotivated she was
Sana didn’t try to correct them, she just shirked away after school, walking home by herself. And after a few months of that, she stopped rushing home after school anyway. She paced the streets of the city until she knew her mother would be asleep; her step-father was always traveling for work anyway. They were still civil enough to give her a bed, lunch money, a cold dish of food, and clean her clothes every other week. But there was no kindness in the act, only preservation of the family name. They couldn’t have Sana running around and slandering the Futaba family with filthy clothes or passing out from hunger. But really, they just wanted her out of the way.
She didn’t like to think of her family.
Yet, in the void, she had no control over what thoughts sifted in or out, including those of her home and school life. Well, past life was a better descriptor now.
Dim recollections floated by; her class instructors, the ring of the school bell, where she usually sat, the multitude of bottles and boxes in the Nurse’s office. Answers to these unasked questions surfaced in her thoughts.
The school had three stories; a brick building painted white with a steeple-like roof.
In class, she was usually assigned a seat in the middle row. Sana kept her head focused downwards, trying to ignore attention from the teacher.
Every day, during the morning break or PE class, Sana would visit the nurses’s office. The nurse, a somewhat-stern shorter woman, had a student aide who would sort out her medication and inhaler. The girl - perhaps her name was Ihara or Iroha - was in Sana’s same year, mid-length pink hair tucked behind her ears and a tender smile that she loved seeing.
It was something Sana desperately desired from her mother.
If Sana had been on better terms with her classmates, she might have asked to borrow the girl’s pencil or study together. But Sana rationalized against this by believing the nurse’s aide must’ve only been practicing a good bedside manner; being kindly only to put her at ease when an asthma attack came on. Nobody gave away such smiles to Sana. She didn’t deserve them.
Apart from the school, the closest place was a rowdy Chinese-food restaurant and a convenience store where kids would linger before and after club events. A little further down the road, towards the city center, sat a florist and a bookshoppe. Sana liked the smell of the plants and frequently sat at the end of the block just to see the beautiful bouquets people left carrying.
Sana liked to imagine who these people were buying flowers for, maybe a lover or relative who’d gotten a new job. Or a marriage. Or maybe a funeral.
Maybe her own funeral.
But that couldn’t be true either. No one had - or would ever - buy flowers for her.
Sana had convinced herself of this.
- -
Occasionally, Sana noticed whispering voices seeping into her asylum. They were often too distant, too faint to make sense of. Only fragments of dialogue which sullied Sana’s mind. She had only the slightest notion that these were present (not remembered) voices. It was something in the way they came unbidden, striking like electricity across the soundless expanse.
“Sheets… Lift...”
“...-nch plans?”
“Iroha… Right?”
“One-… -ty”
These unwelcome murmurs were worse than the tide of memories for she knew that the scenes in the past would eventually wash away, but these voices were too sporadic. The syllables capsized the placid, dull hummm Sana’s ears had become so accustomed to. Words, voices, people began to hurt. She was almost thankful that a memory began to cover the disembodied words in that very moment…
The scene opened up to a gusty February morning, around the time high school entrance exams began. Sana knew she’d fail them, despite the mountain of exhausted highlighters and pens she’d used up studying. It was a simple fact of her life. She was destined to fail.
The book she had been reading lost its focus. Tears burned through her eyes and blazed across her cheeks, giving a sickening pallor to her already-splotchy skin. It must have been lunchtime, for the sounds of talking reverberated from the hallway as students shuffled between classrooms to visit friends. Sana sat in the alcove of the stairwell, like always, burying herself in the fantasy of novels, hoping that she would blend into the scenery. She wished with all her heart that she could disappear. Fade away. Wash her lackluster life away from the shores of humanity. She had no will to keep fighting like the heroines of her books; they always had friends and help from unexpected places. But she had no one. She had no purpose in the narration of her own life.
So Sana dedicated herself to becoming utterly invisible. A wallflower to the background of everyone else’s stories. Gone from her own misery and done burdening all those around her.
She waited until after classes that day, when most of the students had gone out to clubs (or simply home) before slipping into the teacher’s office, her blood pounding furiously against her ear drums. She produced a bottle of white-out from her bag and began the task of erasing her existence. Sana’s heart threatened to beat out of her chest at any moment as she unearthed any paper she could.
By the time the deed was done - a file of school records and signed papers stowed in her sack for later destruction - she remembered to stop by the nurse’s office. She couldn’t very well leave her name on all the bottles and papers in there if she expected people to forget her.
Judging by the clock, the office would still be open, but her legs betrayed every step she’d taken. Her knees weak and skin clammy, the door seemed a thousand yards away (though it was only down the hall). Every never fiber strained with activity, some telling her to stop others telling her to keep going, but she relied on the thoughts that kept quiet and determined and logical.
Right foot, now left foot, now right foot again. Breathe, first in, then out. Repeat. Step by step, second by second, Sana found herself opening the nurse's door with a practiced motion. The clicking of computer keys alerted her to someone's presence; Sana’s throat tightened and lurched unnaturally on the verge of panic.
The nurse’s aide peeked around the desk with a genuine curiosity, a little startled from the creak of the door.
“Oh! Futaba-chan! Did you need something?” A worried crease formed on the aide’s - Iroha’s - brow, seeing the state of her classmate, all rigid muscles and startled pupils. “Please come in, sit down. Would you like any water? Do you need your inhaler?” She took a deep inhale, refocusing her own sense of calm. “Or, if you just needed a quiet place to read, you’re always welcome here.”
The warmth of the other’s voice nearly freed more tears from Sana’s eyes, she hiccuped roughly to subdue them and focused on weaving some excuse why she would need her medication. When her voice finally came, crackling and raw from restraint, she said:
“I-I… I’m going out of town… With my family. I-I-I… I need my things. F-from the cabinet. To take with me…” Sana couldn’t look up from the tile flooring, shame emblazoned on every crevice of her face. Hopefully, to her onlooker, it would only show some sign that she was troubled, and that would be proof enough to provide her pills from the locked case. She didn’t want to have to lie more than she had already.
“Oh, um. Here, why don’t you sit on the table while I collect your things.” The aide’s voice was perplexed, perhaps, or a little doubtful, but a gentle, reassuring arm guided her to the padded table all the same. A couple droplets of water squeezed their way from Sana’s eyes out of spite. She felt absolute hatred for herself, for misleading such a kind, trusting person. The only person who still smiled at her.
But, as soon as Sana disappeared, none of it would matter. Iroha would likely forget her in a couple weeks, like the rest of her classmates, and Sana wouldn’t be around to disrupt them.
Sana sipped at a little wax cup of water, took a puff from her inhaler to calm her windpipe, and left with her other two prescriptions nestled in the rucksack beside the stolen documents.
A day passed in her memory. Time wafted unevenly, speeding up and slowing down, like a videocassette being spun unevenly. She watched the incessant, blinding sun set over the horizon, only to rise again, bringing a new day, but remaining eternally unchanging in itself.
She made her resolution that day not to return.
Sana left on a Saturday carrying only a tote, her clothes, and a meager amount of money.
She left no note, no lasting impression that she was leaving, that she had lived there at all (outside of some lingering clothes in the closet). Likely, the other Futaba family members had forgotten her already. And perhaps the food offerings by the door had become some superstitious tradition instead of meals for a daughter they would rather have never existed.
She had succeeded in her goal of becoming invisible.
She knew this because the car hadn’t seen even the slightest glimpse of Sana as it pulled an illegal U-turn at a crosswalk three weeks later.
It was the most recent memory her mind could cultivate. A screech like race cars making a tight corner. The sensation of being sucked into the belly of a vacuum, paired with a sickening Whack! A grainy picture of lights and shouting and the sky spinning like some monochrome kaleidoscope of blue. The picture continued to blur into pinpricks of light until winking out of existence altogether, like the sudden flash of a television set turning off.
And then she was all alone. Invisible. Finally.
- -
“Chrysanthemums?”
“...Here… fresh water..”
“You’re su-… friend…”
“It’s the - I can do… I -st wish...”
The voices grew louder, rippling the pool of Sana’s awareness with handfuls of rocks. It was more perturbing than before, her mind still recovering from the recent memory recall. The loud sirens of the crash, the churning of her bones against pavement. She felt sick.
She wanted it all to stop.
Sana moved to cover her ears with the stiffened hands she’d lost track of (until now, that is). The sensation was unnerving, even alien. She hadn’t felt the will to move in so long…
Where she expected to feel nothing, only the mere figurative motion of hands silencing her imagined ears, Sana discovered something else…
Hair. Her own very unkempt locks knotting in her hands, rough and frizzy to the touch. In all her wakings, she hadn’t even noticed the overgrown mane until now. Until she became aware of her pain and irritation with the voices and her inescapable torment by them.
Eventually, the intrusive words fully deteriorated, leaving Sana alone with her revelation. She felt the grinding of teeth filling a mouth, her mouth, somewhere nearby her tangled hair. The palms of her hands were dry, sandpapery; the eyes that noticed them equally as arid. Each bone-thin finger was crowned with a flimsy nail that did nothing to protect the fleshy stub. She let the brittle things weave once more into her hair and gently detangle the kinks that had built up over a long span of neglect.
Sana was still uncertain how long she had been winking in and out of attention.
That thought did something new, too. It felt troublesome. It managed to revive Sana’s emotions, the blackened monster that she’d struggled so hard to keep pent up. The screams and anger and tears, smashed plates and insults, ugly things.
Sana was repulsed to the very core, her heart a festering mass of worms in a slimy apple.
And she had nowhere to run.
But the funny thing about moments, single points in time, is that they continue moving either with or without you. And it’s your choice to stand still or keep moving. Sana had learned to understand this notion in the void. One moment something was there, then it washed away in due time. Perhaps it would be easier to see this disgust wash away like everything before it. Let the deep-rooted hatred and despair flow through her… and then out… Moving. No longer stagnant. Not a fact of herself. Simply a state of feeling. Soon to be replaced with a different emotion. Dynamic. Not indefinite, changing, moving forward.
In the blur of that moment into the next, she felt the turning of the world. The slow tip right before falling from some great height. A lurch in her stomach, the buzz of nervousness jittering through her stomach like butterflies. Sana held tight to the air in her lungs, afraid that it might leave her to die otherwise. She scrunched up her eyes and her hands into frail fists. And then…
The moment passed.
She was calmer. Less nauseous, less hateful. Her lungs prodded insistently at her side to restock their supply of oxygen; she obliged. Fingers unfurled, her head floated backwards to rest against some unseen support. It might have been a cloud or a smooth pool of water.
The last things to relax were her eyes, opening up. Bright seafoam bands streaked with little red blood vessels in an expanse of eggshell-white. The flat affect stretched on her face betrayed Sana’s bewilderment. She wasn’t surrounded by a black sea, and this wasn’t a memory either - the colors were too vibrant, the light too harsh. She felt the need to blink, letting unaccustomed muscles strain to adjust her pupils. She wanted to rub the blurriness from her vision, but there was no strength in her limbs. Her body was groggy and drugged from disuse.
The small shuffling motions must have made enough noise to alert an onlooker nearby, for Sana heard someone gasp. The sound was distinct, punctual, real; it wasn’t a noise that floated into the darkness nor a feigned expression like that on a television program. Sana couldn’t move her head to look towards the other, but she didn’t have to wait long before the young woman had moved into view.
With one look, Sana might have guessed the other was an angel, here to take her beyond her previous life. However, after the glare from the halogen light fell away, Sana noticed the other was likely around her own age, perhaps a year older. Her long pink hair plaited into a heavy braid that swayed behind her as she walked. She wore a simple ensemble with black flats making soft click-clacks on the flooring.
The sound didn’t bother Sana, perhaps because she immediately liked the aura of this stranger and her click-clacking shoes and her slightly trembling hands. The way she seemed relieved, nervous, and about to cry all at once. And something seemed so awfully familiar about her.
“O-oh! Um! I should call the nurse. Please hold on Sana-chan.”
Even the other’s voice was a mixture of warmth and frenzied surprise. Sana thought it even sounded a little like her own. Though she hadn’t spoken for such a long time, judging by the think film gluing her tongue to her hard palate.
A clock from somewhere across the room ticked one-hundred and eighty-three seconds before the sound of voices entered the confined space once again. Sana was feeling sleepy again, but she wanted to hear the pink-haired stranger’s voice smooth over her mind more than return to the empty void. It was ever so lonely in there.
Sana pushed back against her drooping eyelids and tried to move her arm again (unfortunately to no avail).
“I-I’m back, S-sana…” her braid slipped over one shoulder as she choked up with a small sob. Her eyes were puffy and started to water uncontrollably. “S-sorry. I.. I just.. thought you might not… I’m just so happy.”
Even as the nurse came to Sana’s bedside, checking some charts as she wrote notes and arranged for other matters, Sana couldn’t take her own eyes from the watery-pink ones that held so much emotion. All for her. She’d been so convinced that no one would miss her, that no one would notice she’d left school, left her house. Sana couldn’t begin to understand why this other soul would cry on her - Sana’s - behalf. But this made Sana want to cry too, and embrace, and feel the flood of sympathy course through her veins like gutters in a flood of love. But her body was so so so heavy. Words dead on her limp tongue.
But at last her mind connected the pieces, unearthed the forgotten connection she had to this girl, her classmate, the only person who had noticed her.
“Iroha, could you please get another blanket from the heater?”
“O-of course!” The wave of cotton-candy pink fell back across Iroha’s shoulder as she moved towards the front of the room, producing a sheet. Together, they spread it evenly across Sana’s shoulders, to which Sana was immensely grateful. She hadn’t noticed just how cold her body was. The heat began to alleviate the stiffness in her muscles.
Sana pushed her emaciated hand over the side of the bed’s railing, reaching towards the tenderness that had escaped Sana for so long, that she had been unable to accept from others.
Two warm, pillow-y hands clasped tight to Sana’s and she tried to smile back at the other who had already reached out with genuine emotion. Their smiles met in a silly, mismatched way.
Iroha nearly collapsed at Sana’s bedside, the wash of emotions overtaking her. She gripped tight to Sana’s hand and cried all the tears she hadn’t in the weeks since the Sana’s accident.
And through them all, the onslaught of water works, Iroha smiled.
And Sana smiled back.